Mastering Japanese Fukushima

Fukushima is not only here to stay, but it could turn into a source of revenues for interpreters. Key words may be decontamination and decommissioning. It may be great time to start being confident first with media and official speech about the Fukushima situation by performing focused shadowing, that includes script and video based shadowing from the sources. The effort can be sustained by trying not to read and listen to everything around, but instead focus on two sources to start with that will tremendously help getting wet and more at daily Fukushima report jargon and figures of speech. I am actually looking for equivalent, single or dual resources for English and French.

Let's start here with Japanese. I recommend and I am using for the start being the two following resources that are, unfortunately for the situation at large, but fortunately for language services delivery preparation, growing on a daily basis. These are choked full with the technical and political jargon that must be mastered to go further deeper into potential customers' needs.

First is the NHK online news web site where past up to current newscaster's scripts from March 12 (why not 11.3?) are listed on this page.   There are not enough video clips inserted but you can gain rather quickly an ease at delivering standard media speech on Fukushima by reading aloud everything available, and shadowing the few video clips scattered along. Thanks to redundancy of vocabulary complement+verb blocks that are, especially for verbs coming in the end of the sentence in Japanese, a conundrum and key at proficiency for non-native learners and users of the Japanese language. Redundancy is good.

Parallel to this is the collection of Yukio Edano, the current cool and well articulated chief cabinet secretary press briefings, both with scripts and the link attached to the video, starting here in March 11. The connexion may be slow. As you can bet, you are not alone querying the Prime Minister web site.

I would recommend not get astray and click away to other resources. There are plenty of these, but focusing on these two to start with may be the best competence growth strategy.